Kidmondo Archive

NY-based child journal service Kidmondo has announced a partnership with another NY-based company, SharedBook. When I reviewed Kidmondo back in May, I suggested that this partnership should be made because both companies could benefit in overall distribution. And it’s great to see NY helping NY.

The printed book is a "Kidbook" and really is a great way to take the online journal offline to create the more traditional children’s journal and keepsake. It’s also a good idea to have as a backup and to share with family who aren’t online.

Kidmondo has also announced several upgrades to their service. The free plan now supports 100mb photo storage which ties into the printed book offering. They have reduced pricing on the premium plans and now offer bulk-uploads for photos, Vimeo video integration and improved milestones support.

Kidmondo co-founder Daniel Hallac tells me pricing for the KidBook begins at $28.00 for a perfectly bound soft cover book and $38.00 for a laminated hard cover. These prices include a full-color 20-page book with free U.S. shipping and a readable flipbook online version of the book that can be distributed via email.  

A new NYC startup launched earlier this week named Kidmondo. Co-founder Daniel Hallac describes the site as, "Kidmondo is a personalized online baby journal that helps parents to easily chronicle their child’s life and share it with friends and family in a safe environment."

I was able to get a baby quickly and create a profile on Kidmondo for my new child. Kidmondo offers a diary (blog), image gallery, an about page, a growth chart, health records and a timeline. Photos can be uploaded to Kidmondo and videos must be uploaded to YouTube. That’s a mistake in my book as most parents won’t want to put their private child videos on a public site. I’d suggest that Kidmondo partners with a video host to create a private path to the videos.

There are connections to Twitter and Wikipedia. A nice touch is the "this day in history" on Wikipedia. I’ve addressed the pricing below but they need to consider an archive price – that is once the child reaches an age where you no longer want to add any updates but want to continue the account, the pricing should be much lower on an annual basis.

This site reminds me of Dogster in that it’s a niche but could be a very profitable niche. While on the surface it seems like the site would only be used when the child is young, parents will want to return to it over time and share it with other family and friends. Kidmondo could be an affiliate dream by showing ads that relate to the child at their current stage of life.

I did notice a variety of layout issues in IE7 across the site. A partnership with NY-based SharedBook might be a perfect way to offer a printed album of the information on Kidmondo for those family members without Internet access.

I’d like to address one other area where I see startups making consistent errors in. Kidmondo offers a freemium model – that is, they offer some basic services for free and charge a small per-month fee for the premium services. Below is the pricing chart for Kidmondo. What I see over and over is that startups give so much for free that there is no reason to upgrade! With Kidmondo the only difference is number of child profiles, ads/no ads and storage size. The free account allows for 3 children and has ads. How many families will have more than 3 children? In my opinion it should be one kid for free, after that you pay. Please stop giving away so much that there’s no reason to pay! Give away just enough and then hook them on the upgrades.